Cobots:

Robots for collaboration
with people

A cobot is
a robot for direct physical interaction with a human user, within
a shared workspace.

Cobots were invented
by Northwestern University professors J. Edward
Colgate and Michael
Peshkin in 1996. Cobots were intitially called "programmable constraint machines", highlighting a passive and safe method for allowing a computer to create a constraint surface for a human user (and optionally a payload) to follow.

The term "cobot" was coined by Brent Gillespie, a postdoc at Northwestern University at that time, in response to a lab competition to come up with a better name.
Cobot was chosen as one of the Words of Tomorrow by the Wall Street Journal in its January 1 2000 issue. Brent won $50.

The first patent related to cobots (US 5,923,129) was filed in February 1996, and a patent using the new name (US 5,952,796) was filed in October 1997.

Development of cobots at Northwestern University was supported by the General Motors Foundation,
the National Science Foundation, and Ford Motor Company.

A spinoff company, Cobotics
LLC, was founded in 1996 by Colgate and Peshkin, to develop, manufacture, and license cobotic
technology. In 2002 Cobotics LLC was acquired by Stanley
Assembly Technologies, Inc.

Other terms that are used for human-interactive robots include collaborative robots,
co-robots, and Intelligent Assist Devices (IADs). IAD is used especially in the material handling field.